SEM Expert Seeks Apprentice

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog… my apologies to all who have expected more. Poor health and poor timing have conspired against me.

So a little quick news will have to do for today:

I Will Be at SES (Search Engine Strategies) in San Jose… but only on Monday August 8. Actually I’ll be there on Sunday too, and I’m not flying home until Tuesday morning, but if you want to see me in person, I’ll be speaking in the Search Term Research and Search APIs sessions on Monday… then look for me wherever free drinks are being served.

Jupiter Media has sold the SES show, Clickz, and Search Engine Watch. Comments from Alan Meckler explain it all. As long as Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are still putting the SES conferences together, then the shows will still be good, and this transaction is a non-event for most folks in SEM.

Google is changing the rules on Adwords a bit – basically, if you want to spend enough, your ads won’t get turned off even if they aren’t getting clicked. Chris Sherman explains it better than Google did, with good background info. Exactly the sort of thing I would have been blogging about if I had been blogging.

I am looking for an apprentice/sidekick or two, willing to exchange some of their time for access to my SEO training classes. You get to do a bit of grunt work, but you don’t have to pay for the training, and we will have some 1:1 time to talk about online marketing. If interested, send an email to evilapprentice(at)seoresearchlabs(dot)com. Please don’t post comments to this blog indicating interest, as this will indicate that you can’t read simple instructions, which would make you an unsuitable apprentice.

Random noise:
I am working on a pretty big article for SitePoint on the best-in-class search engine marketing tools… hopefully they’ll still want it when it’s done; once that’s done I’ll finish my manifesto and get that out to the world; go ahead and start the rumors about a 2006 edition of the SitePoint SEM Kit, but get the 2005 edition today because it’s solid gold and you can’t wait 9 months to get better at SEM.

I’ve been readiing Marketing Warfare again, and I still think that Al Ries and Jack Trout are pretty smart… I also think that they really misunderstood the computer industry. I was the guy at the Apple shareholder’s meeting all those years ago who asked why they didn’t just port their operating system to run on standard PC hardware before Microsoft built a decent MacOS knockoff. To this day, nobody has an answer, and Apple has turned into iTunes pretty much… they’re lucky to be in any business at this point.